Your Friendly Neighborhood Demagogue

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on Thursday, 9/10/2009 4:09 pm

We've written about "Coach" Dave Daubenmire a few times in the past, once when he Alan Keyes, Rick Scarborough, and Peter Labarbera attended his "Gathering of Eagles" and another time when he signed on to a letter demanding Jed Babbin's firing as editor of Human Events for providing unacceptably positive coverage of Mitt Romney.

That effort apparently catapulted him into right-wing media stardom according to this new profile of Daubenmire from Columbus, Ohio's "The Other Paper" entitled "Meet Your Local Demagogue":

Daubenmire founded Minute Men United, a nationwide organization of evangelical men who stage confrontational anti-homosexual actions at LGBT-friendly events with the self-appointed mission (as published in a Minute Men tract) of “uniting and mobilizing God-fearing Americans.” In August 2007, the Dispatch reported on the group’s interruption of LGBT-friendly church services at several Central Ohio churches, including King Avenue United Methodist Church in Columbus. They are a regular presence at Gay Pride parades across the nation. Daubenmire has been active, both in street protests (he spoke at the notorious Operation Save America rally in Downtown Columbus in 2004 that included a viewing of a human fetus in a coffin that the group was transporting to Washington for burial. Event organizers filed city burn permits to incinerate a copy of the Qu`ran, as well as rainbow flags).

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But lately, Daubenmire’s new-media cultivation of his Christian, Libertarian-minded outrage (he bears no official ties to the Libertarian Party of Ohio) has landed him multiple appearances on Fox News, Geraldo Rivera’s talk show, and, according to his website, Hannity and Colmes, the CBS Evening News, The Edge with Paula Zahn and Scarborough County on MSNBC.

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He attributes the demand from mass media outlets like Fox News for his appearance to two things: “number one, I’m uncompromising, I say what I think. And number two, I think I can articulate it in a way that people understand.”

Though Daubenmire sees no compromise in dialogues over crucial public policy issues such as health care reform, reproductive rights or gay marriage, he insists it isn’t because he is without empathy for those he refers to on his website as the “enemies of god.”

“I don’t get mad at my opposition because I used to think like them. I was a hell-raising, partying, carousing, howling dog. I’ve lived the sinful side. I know how that makes you think, makes you act,” said Daubenmire, a born-again evangelical who converted from Catholicism at 35.

The burden of being disliked, hated even, weighs on him he said comparing himself to the Apostle Paul. “’Do I now become your enemy because I tell the truth?’ That’s how I feel a lot of the time—I just speak the truth and make enemies.”